“These recordings have never sounded this good, and likely will never sound better. Layers seem to have been stripped away, and the music seems to have been set free. Vaughan’s guitar has new bite and edge...sonically, all questions have now been answered...” - Robert Baird, Stereophile

The Sky Is Crying was released after SRV’s 1990 helicopter crash that took his life. The posthumously assembled 10-track outtakes collection actually proves to be one of Vaughan’s most consistent albums, rivaling In Step as the best outside of the Greatest Hits collection. These songs were recorded in sessions spanning from 1984’s Couldn’t Stand the Weather to 1989’s In Step and were left off of the LPs for whatever reason (or, in the case of Soul to Soul’s “Empty Arms,” a different version was used).

What makes the record work is its eclectic diversity — Vaughan plays slide guitar on “Boot Hill” and acoustic on “Life By The Drop”; he smokes on the slow blues of “May I Have a Talk With You” and the title track just as much as on the up-tempo Lonnie Mack cover, “Wham”; and he shows the jazzy side of his playing on Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and Kenny Burrell’s “Chitlins Con Carne.”